One of the most revealing cinematic moments of recent memory was at the beginning of the first Austin Powers film.

As those who saw this 1997 comedy recall, Powers, a British secret agent, had been cryogenically frozen in 1967 in case his nemesis, Dr. Evil, should ever return. Fast forward 20 years and Dr. Evil again threatens to take over the world, prompting the British secret service to reanimate our hero. Powers opens his eyes and is introduced to an American officer and also to General Borschevsky. The latter’s presence startles him. “Russian intelligence, are you mad?” he asks. When he’s informed that the Cold War between Russia and the West has ended, he doesn’t miss a beat: “Well! Finally those capitalist pigs will pay for their crimes, eh comrades?” Then he’s told who won. His sheepish comeback, with a weak thumbs up: “Groovy, smashing. Yay capitalism.”

Herbert Hoover's legacy is perhaps forever linked with the failure of the American economy under his presidency after the stock market crash of 1929 and his ensuing defeat by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the election of 1932. Further adding to his difficulties is the charge that he was progressive-lite in his policies before and after the Great Depression. The proper foundation, it follows, for advocates of a renewed conservative focus is Calvin Coolidge, a President who cut budgets and taxes. This discussion with Hoover scholar George Nash begs to differ.
Nash, who previously appeared on Liberty Law Talk to discuss the…

Editor’s note: Stephen Schuker, a first-time contributor to Law and Liberty, assesses in this post the lengthy volume Freedom Betrayed: Herbert Hoover’s Secret History of the Second World War. Published in 2011, the book contains Herbert Hoover’s arguments that America’s commitments to individual and economic liberty and restrained foreign policy were betrayed by the Roosevelt administration and in subsequent postwar domestic and foreign policies. For a conversation with George Nash, editor of Freedom Betrayed and author of the book’s excellent introduction, about Hoover’s political and humanitarian career and his motivations in writing this grand book see this Liberty Law Talk podcast.

On 4 March 1933 Herbert Hoover accompanied his successor to the Capitol for the swearing-in ceremony. The two men maintained a frosty silence. As the economy spiraled down during the presidential interregnum, Franklin Roosevelt had refused to cooperate with the outgoing chief executive in any way. Hoover then left for Union Station, rejected by the American people, seemingly a broken man. Worse was to come. When Hoover boarded the train, his secret service detail melted away. A mob assailed him when he reached New York. Taking up residence at the Waldorf-Astoria, he found his phones tapped, his mail opened. Several members of his administration would shortly receive unwelcome scrutiny from the IRS. Even more galling, Roosevelt adopted some of Hoover’s policies, but accorded him no credit. The Republican Treasury secretary stayed on sub rosa and reopened the banks, but no one appeared to notice who had expertise and who did not. A lesser man than Hoover would have collapsed. Instead, Hoover rallied, sustained by his indomitable spirit and iron self-discipline. Over the next thirty-one years, he published more than thirty books. When Roosevelt’s biographer inquired about the secret of his productivity, Hoover replied simply: “I outlived the bastards.”

Except when giving speeches or supervising the growing collections of the Hoover Institution at Stanford, the ex-president sat tethered to his desk twelve or thirteen hours a day. After his wife died, he often rose in the middle of the night to labor two more hours. He kept six secretaries and a Ph.D. research assistant fully employed. Having caught the spirit of the age in his 1922 volume, American Individualism, a paean to the country’s exceptionalism and voluntarist tradition, Hoover followed in 1934 and 1936 with trenchant analyses of what he called New Deal collectivism. As Hoover saw it, the intrusion of the Leviathan state into every corner of American life would lead sooner rather than later to a curtailment of personal liberties and economic freedom. He thus anticipated the critique of central planning that Friedrich Hayek in ­The Road to Serfdom would later embed in a formal methodology. Hoover also churned out three thick volumes of memoirs, a four-volume chronicle of his efforts to provide food relief during and following the world wars, two studies of Woodrow Wilson, innumerable collections of speeches, and even a book on fishing.

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